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Problems of Being Left-Handed, By John Robertson (acrylic on unstretched canvas)

It sure was nice to be in New Mexico for a minute. Big sky, cool, crisp air, hot sun.

Got home in time to see the kid Jason Heyward hit a dinger in his first major league at bat for the Braves. And it was a blast.

Welcome. And Happy Baseball.

Got to give it to this kid. He knows how to spread the mustard on the ol’ Hammond:

Happy Opening Day!

Ballpark favorites…

Happy Easter y’all. This was always one of my favorite holidays as a kid (one of the benefits of having a Catholic mother and a Jewish father–double holidays!). My mom was big on painting eggs the night before; we’d wake up Easter morning and have an Easter Egg hunt (and if the weather was lousy we’d have it inside).

Welp, today Easter falls on Opening Day, or Opening Night of the 2010 baseball season. It’s the 8th Opening Day for us here at the Banter and we’re thrilled and delighted to have you guys along with us for what promises to be another absorbing season of Yankees baseball.

Let’s do this like Brutus.

Butler just beat Michigan State to reach the NCAA finals with Duke and West Virginia set to tip off in a few minutes.

Opening Day 24 hours away.

Anyone eager to start another season root-root-rooting for the Whirled Champion Noo J’ork Jankees?

Bring it…

The classic routine…

Back to Peter Sellers singing from the Beatles song book.

According to a report by Michael Schmidt in the New York Times:

Alex Rodriguez told investigators and lawyers for Major League Baseball on Thursday that he was treated by a Canadian-based doctor now under investigation by federal authorities but that he did not receive performance-enhancing drugs from him, according to two people in baseball with knowledge of the meeting.

In meeting with the Yankees’ Rodriguez for a three-hour interview Thursday night in Florida, baseball officials ended up beating the federal authorities to the punch. The authorities have sought to interview Rodriguez for weeks but have not yet done so. Baseball officials and the federal authorities want to know what interactions Rodriguez had with the doctor, Anthony Galea, who has stated that he treated him in 2009 with anti-inflammatories after Rodriguez’s hip surgery.

Tell ’em what to say, Mase:

I don’t know from wide variety of chiles and peppers that exist in the world but out here they reign supreme. I’ve heard that chile can be addicting and after trying my sister-in-law’s Chilaquiles yesterday I think I understand why. The dish is simple–toasted corn tortillas covered with a radiant-looking sauce of New Mexico Red Chile covered with grated cheese and some raw onion and served with eggs and re-fried beans.

The chile sauce had some spice to it but not overwhelming heat–instead, I really tasted a deep, complex flavor. The addiction part is no joke because my mouth is watering just thinking about it.

Em’s sister has bags of chiles in her freezer. The chiles are reconstituted in hot water before pureed into a sauce.

Happy Eats with my brother-in-law…with a side order of Matzoh.

I saw an interesting show of photographs–mostly by Man Ray, some by Walker Evans and others–of African Art yesterday at the University of New Mexico’s art museum.

Photograph by Walker Evans. Africa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Luba peoples, Gelatin silver print; 7 x 9 3/8 in. (17.8 x 23.8 cm)

So I hear Nick Johnson dinged hisself up today. No surprise there, I’m sorry to say.

Think the Yanks can get 450 at bats from him this year?

Beautiful thing about Charlie Pierce is the man doesn’t mince words. Here is his take on a recent piece about Bernie Carbo:

Seriously, illegal amphetamines were being handed out by untrained team staff, without the faintest notion of informed consent, to rookies on behalf of the clubs themselves. Major-league baseball was pushing speed, and lying to the people to whom it was pushing it. This is precisely the way the dealers in the early years got the crack epidemic up and running. No wonder Carbo got hooked.

(And don’t even start with the argument about what “performance-enhancing” really means. Giving you speed while telling you that it was vitamin pills, and doing so clearly in the hope of making you play better, means that the trainer — and through him, the club — is trying to enhance your performance. Period. Unless words mean nothing at all, the debate is all useless semantics, except that I suspect more of the guys who juiced in the 1990’s benefitted from better medical advice than did the guys in the 1970’s who were gobbling speed like it was Jujubes.)

What do we do now? Take these guys out of the Hall of Fame? Obliterate them from the record books? Show up at Old Timer’s Days and boo them? (“AND WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN???????????”) Treat, say, Mike Schmidt like Barry Bonds? These guys all took illegal drugs and did so to play better. Unless you define your morality by what sounds best during your spot on Around The Horn, there is no moral difference in the two cases worthy of discussion.

Mornin’ Sunshine.

Julie Christie. Yeah, she had it going on, didn’t she? Talent to burn and not bad to look at neither.

Ocean Park #122 By Richard Diebenkorn, 1980; painting; oil and charcoal on canvas, 100 in. x 80 5/8 in. (254 cm x 204.79 cm)

So I’m out here in Albetoikey, New Mexico for a few days visiting family with the wife. It’s like being on the light side of the moon, man. I hope to have a couple of good meals, and although the famous Hatch Green Chiles are out-of-season, my sister-in-law has plenty on hand–she freezes them every fall–and I’m all about trying them because heads from New Mexico are crackheads for their Green Chiles, B.

There’s a fun new book for Yankee fans of a certain age called Yankees By the Numbers: A Complete Team History of the Bronx Bombers by Uniform Number, by Bill Gutman. Most of the player essays are accompanied by a picture of their baseball card. Plenty of memory lane names there–Dirt Tidrow, Bobby Meacham, Claudell Washington, Oscar Gamble–to go with the usual Legends, Ruth, Gehrig, Joe D, the Mick, Reggie, Jeter.

Reggie’s 1978 Topps card. My favorite card ever.

Dig it.

Dig this long, thoughtful piece on John Cheever by Edmond White in April 8 edition of the New York Review of Books:

Howard Moss, the poetry editor of The New Yorker, once said that fiction should be a combination of fairy tale and newspaper report. Cheever is sometimes discussed as a sociologist of the suburbs, but in fact a gold dust of fantasy touches everything he writes. In one of his best stories, “The Country Husband” (the story that made Hemingway wake up his wife in the middle of the night so that he could read it out loud to her), a man named Francis Weed survives a plane crash and hurries overland to his Dutch colonial house in Shady Hill. His children are squabbling, his wife preoccupied, and no one seems capable of registering his near brush with death. Francis falls in love with the baby-sitter; his wife threatens to leave him not because of his adulterous yearnings (which she doesn’t know about) but because he’s inconsiderate and has jeopardized their social standing by insulting the doyenne of Shady Hill. Francis sees a psychiatrist—and the whole suburban pastoral ends with the mysterious, irrelevant, but transfiguring lines: “Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.”

…Cheever, who was immensely likable, met and befriended many of the leading writers and artists of the day, became quite close to E.E. Cummings, and even had a guilt-ridden affair with the usually heterosexual photographer Walker Evans. Yaddo became his favorite retreat, an important refuge during the Depression, and the director, Elizabeth Ames, invited him back many times. In 1941 Cheever married Mary Winternitz, whose father had been the dean of Yale Medical School and whose grandfather, Thomas A. Watson, had been a coinventor of the telephone. Cheever, working hard to support a wife, began to publish in the “slicks” such as Harper’s Bazaar, Collier’s, and Mademoiselle. In 1942 he enlisted in the army and tested low-normal on the government IQ test. In 1942 he published his first short-story collection, The Way Some People Live, which wasn’t very good but may have saved his life since it impressed a major in the army who was also an MGM executive. He withdrew Cheever from his unit, which suffered terrible casualties in Europe in the last months of the war. Cheever was transferred as a writer to the former Paramount studios in Astoria, Queens.

After the war he began his twenty-year struggle to produce his first novel, which would finally take shape as The Wapshot Chronicle. In the meanwhile he supported his growing family by writing many, many stories for The New Yorker. Although people today revere The New Yorker, in the past it was something of a liability; I can remember in the 1950s how dismissive it was to call something a “typical New Yorker story,” by which people meant something slight, stylish, and vapid.